The woman who Vincent van Gogh gave his own ear to after slicing it off has been named after more than 130 years of mystery.

It has long been said that the painter chopped off his lobe in a moment of madness before dropping it off at a brothel where he handed it to a prostitute named 'Rachel'.

Now it has been unveiled that the woman is Gabrielle Berlatier, a farmer's daughter working as a maid at the brothel in Arles, southern France, to pay off her medical bills after being savaged by a rabid dog.

Earlier this month a handwritten letter from physician, Dr Félix Rey, who treated the wound in December 1888, was found and cast doubts on the theory that he only sliced off a lobe.

His sketches, drawn in August 1930, show the artist actually hacked off almost his entire ear with a razor and not just a part as previously claimed.

The handwritten letter dated 18 August 1930 from Félix Rey to Irving Stone with drawings of Vincent van Gogh’s mutilated ear (Image: The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)

Researched Bernadette Murphy uncovered the letter and went on to trace the family of the unknown girl said to have been given Van Gogh's severed ear.

Ms Murphy, who spent seven years cross-referencing records from the period to find 'Gabrielle', believes he may have been offering her his flesh in a bizarre attempt to help heal her.

Murphy wrote that she made a promise to Gabrielle’s descendants to keep quiet about her name, but The Art Newspaper followed up her research using an open archive and tracked down the woman’s name in the records of the Institut Pasteur in Paris, where Gabrielle was treated for rabies.

After moving from the UK to Provence, France, she began researching the artist before presenting her findings to experts at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Her discoveries will now go on display as part of a public exhibition this week and she is also set to publish a book of her findings entitled Van Gogh’s Ear: The True Story, which will form the basis for a BBC new documentary.